- Author
-
U.S. Fire Administration
- Title
- Urban Search and Rescue in Will County, Illinois Following the 1990 Tornado.
- Coporate
- U.S. Fire Administration, Washington, DC
- Report
-
FA-122
November 1992
23 p.
- Contract
- EMW-91-C-3679
- Keywords
-
fire investigations
|
rescue
|
weather effects
|
death
|
injuries
|
emergencies
- Identifiers
- tornados; mutual aid
- Abstract
- On Tuesday, August 28, 1990 at approximately 1:30 p.m., a thunderstorm system developed near Janesville, Wisconsin. For the next three hours the storm moved southeast creating numerous tornadoes as it moved across northern Illinois. (See Appendix A for area map showing the path of the tornado.) One touched down at 3:30 p.m. on the Kendall-Will County dividing line and raced along the ground for over 16 miles. The National Weather Service had not issued a prior alert and did not put out a tornado warning to Will County until 21 minutes after it first struck. Within Will County, the disastrous tornado left a trail of death, injuries, and tremendous devastation in a path more than seven miles long and 700 feet wide. Its front moved at 70 miles per hour with clouds topping at 60,000 feet. The tornado consisted of four funnels spinning around the perimeter of a larger funnel cloud at speeds estimated to be more than 250 miles per hour. Over 1,700 residences and businesses were either completely destroyed or severely damaged. Twenty-nine people died. More than 350 people were treated at local hospitals. Thousands of people were left homeless. Because of the vastness of these emergency operations, many lessons were learned covering a wide variety of topics, some of them unexpected. Thirty-nine lessons from this tragic incident are presented later in this report relating to search and rescue techniques, logistical problems, communications, problems with the media, coordination of non-emergency volunteers, the lack of on-scene documentation, political sensitivities, and other areas of emergency management.